A federally contracted mediator will visit campus to help negotiate the faculty contract between the Eastern Chapter of the University Professionals of Illinois and Eastern’s administration on August 28.

Fifteen meetings between both negotiating teams were held over the summer in addition to sidebars between chief negotiators John Allison for UPI and Bob Wayland for the administration.

“We’ve had a lot of meetings, we’ve made a lot of progress, but we got to a point where we couldn’t move anymore,” Wayland said. With a third party intervening, he thinks it is possible to reach an agreement at the first mediation meeting.

“I expect that we will get a contract very soon,” Wayland said.

He is confident the mediator will help the two parties find a common ground.

“We have made them an offer of a very generous package,” he said. “It’s a better economic package than anybody else on this campus has received, and it’s probably going to be better than what other universities are receiving.”

Both UPI and the administration declined to discuss the language of the contract and are hoping to resolve the issue quickly between the two parties.

“We believe it’s in the interest of the entire university to settle on a good contract as soon as possible,” said UPI President Charles Delman. “The sooner we get a good contract, the sooner we can devote our full energy to our jobs.”

The current contract is set to expire Aug. 31, and will affect tenured faculty, annually contracted faculty and academic support professionals.

A federally contracted mediator has helped settle contracts between the two parties in the past, including the one up for expiration next week. The 2002-2006 contract was not signed until Spring 2003, more than 12 months after the previous contract had expired.

That contract was renewed and allowed to expire again before the parties were able to find a compromise, prompting the possibility of a strike.

Delman said current discussions have not reached that same level of intensity.

“It’s premature to worry about a strike now,” he said.

Both parties have said they are acting in the best interest of the university and the students.

“We have common goals, but we sometimes see things differently with how we’re going to meet some of those goals,” Wayland said. “We feel like we’re operating in the best interest of the university, and we would hope that they (UPI) are too.”

Allison said the negotiations will affect “almost everything related to instruction and the quality of instruction at Eastern” including the students.

“We hope that the administration will use the mediation process as a means to reach an agreement that both sides can accept,” he said. “That’s certainly what we want to do.”

UPI is holding a members meeting at 4 p.m. today in the Lumpkin Auditorium to inform their members of the state of negotiations.

“They will be able to see in detail what the administration has proposed so far,” Allison said. “We want to find out what the attendees of this meeting think about the administrations most recent proposal.”

A second meeting is scheduled with the federal mediator for Sept. 6.